Best jobs opportunities in Malaysia

Bank Negara, Petronas listed as best employers to work for

Via The Star : Business and engineering students listed Bank Negara and Petroliam Nasional Bhd (Petronas) as their ideal employers to work with once they graduate in a survey conducted by employer branding company Universum.

Petronas is ranked tops for the second year running in the engineering category in the Malaysia top-100 ideal employers student survey. After Petronas, the students prefer to work in Shell, Sime Darby Bhd, SapuraKencana Petroleum Bhd, Schlumberger and Tenaga Nasional Bhd (TNB) in the engineering standard.

Petronas is ranked tops for the second year running in the engineering category in the Malaysia top-100 ideal employers student survey. After Petronas, the students prefer to work in Shell, Sime Darby Bhd, SapuraKencana Petroleum Bhd, Schlumberger and Tenaga Nasional Bhd (TNB) in the engineering standard.

In the business category and after Bank Negara, they prefer Petronas, Lembaga Tabung Haji, Sime Darby, Google and Malayan Banking Bhd.

Despite all its financial woes, business and engineering students also want to be employed by Malaysia Airlines (MAS), as it ranked eight and seventh in the business and engineering categories, respectively, this year, while rival AirAsia Bhd fell from fourth position to seventh spot this year in the business category. Last year, MAS was in the fourth and eighth spot for business and engineering students, respectively.

Khazanah Nasional Bhd rose to the tenth spot as the ideal business employer from 25th place last year, while TNB jumped to 12th spot from 36th place previously in the engineering standard.

About 17,000 students participated in the survey to disclose who their preferred employers were post-graduation. The survey done online is conducted annually in 55 countries globally.

Universum said when evaluating employer attractiveness, young Malaysians had similar desires to neighbouring nations such as Singapore, and were most attracted to “a friendly work environment”, “high future earnings” and “professional training and development”.

“This is good and bad news for employers who are not currently the most attractive among their talent competitors. Good because items like ‘professional training and development’, and even ‘high future earnings’, can be implemented at a reasonable cost and with relative agility. Improving external perception regarding ‘a friendly work environment’ is often a much longer and trickier process,’’ Universum said in a statement.

Almost two-thirds of all the students surveyed or 63.2% said their top priority was work/life balance, and ranking second in importance to Malaysian talent was “to be secure or stable in my job”, with 48.5% valuing this among their top career goals.

Universum said there was a similar decline in being “dedicated to a cause or to feel that I am serving the greater good”, which dropped from third to sixth for engineering students and from fourth to sixth for business students.

It added that where the data did see some interesting movement in 2015 was the emergence of “to be a technical or functional expert”, which rose from sixth to third-most important career goal for engineering students. This is a highly positive attitude shift in a market that is calling out for more technically skilled talent to take up hard-to-fill positions.

In Thailand, the most ideal employer by business students was Thai Airways International, while those studying engineering nominated state-owned oil and gas company PTT Public Co Ltd (formerly the Petroleum Authority of Thailand) as their choice.

Globally, college students across every academic discipline want to work for Google after graduation.

“Because Universum runs this survey on a large scale across the world, it makes regional comparisons highly fascinating. What’s clear from this year’s data is that Malaysian millennials share many of the same goals, aspirations and fears as the majority of their regional and global peers,’’ said Universum regional business development director Kit Foong.

Petronas’ senior vice-president of group human resources management Raiha Azni Abdul Rahman said Petronas had always believed in building the right talent, which was one of its three Global Talent Strategy thrusts, besides building right leaders and creating the right environment to support aggressive business growth.